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In 2016, problems with the health insurance marketplaces that were set up by the Affordable Care Act became too big to ignore. Here are are talking points on the market turmoil, the problems with treating healthcare as a market commodity, and how universal, publicly financed healthcare offers the solution.

This comprehensive tool enables a human rights assessment of a wide range of healthcare reform initiatives, based on key human rights principles. It was originally developed for and applied to the reform effort in Vermont.

This fact sheet describes the components of a human rights narrative and how it can be used to counter dominant narratives that deny people’s rights and maintain systems of oppression. A human rights narrative reflects shared values that unify people around a positive vision for transformative change.

These three Facilitator’s Guides were created for and used at Vermont’s People’s Convention for Human Rights in 2012. The Problem Tree workshop gets participants to map out their experiences of the human rights crisis in their communities and to identify the root causes of these problems. For Facilitator’s Guide, click here. The Principled Vision workshop […]

A facilitation guide for a workshop that presents the human rights framework as a way to articulate our vision for a different kind of world and to increase our understanding of the human rights principles. The idea of the workshop is to “exercise the muscle” in our brains that helps us think about these principles […]

This document summarizes research evidence showing that all forms of out-of-pocket costs, or “cost-sharing,” harm people’s health by discouraging especially low-income people from seeking necessary care and filling their medication prescriptions.

This exercise is designed to get folks thinking about the root causes of the problems they experience and see in their workplaces and communities, and to introduce the concept of doing “root work” to transform the underlying systems.

This exercise is designed to get participants wrestling with how power relationships work in our society. It offers a simple way to understand how decisions are made in our current political system and how that changes when we organize.

This worksheet, prepared by the Vermont Workers’ Center, is intended to assist Organizing Committee coordinators in both assessing their committee’s contacts and members and coming up with next steps to advance these contacts and members in their leadership development.

This list of debrief questions, prepared by the Vermont Workers’ Center, is intended to assist organizers and committee and team coordinators in thinking about the organization’s members and creating concrete next steps and plans for their ongoing leadership development.

This guide, prepared by the Vermont Workers Center, is intended for introducing new members to the organization’s standing agreements which when observed help maintain a healthy organizational culture.

This table, produced by the Vermont Workers’ Center, offers a great collection of team building and meeting facilitation tools for making sure that all voices and perspectives are heard, collecting feedback, building relationships, arriving at consensus, and lots more.

These Put People First! PA pamphlets and flyers are great tools to start discussions with friends, family and neighbors about issues really affecting their lives, introduce them to the organization and ask them if they’d like to join.

This powerpoint workshop presentation, produced by the United Workers, offers considerations in choosing a point of entry or outreach to potential new members and the basics of canvassing and organizing conversations.

This training, prepared by Put People First! PA, is intended to prepare members for participating in a door knocking drive. It reviews the purpose of door knocking, the goals of a particular drive, a rap or plan for an organizing conversation, the materials included in a door knocking kit, and a role play which clarifies […]

This document, produced by the Vermont Workers’ Center, describes the five parts of an effective and structured organizing conversation when talking to new people about the organization and its campaign.

This short video, produced by NESRI in collaboration with the Vermont Workers’ Center and their People’s Budget Campaign, explains how public budgets work now, and how they can and should work based on people’s voices, needs and rights. The People’s Budget Campaign won a law requiring Vermont to develop a budget that addresses needs, advances […]

This guide, produced by the Vermont Workers’ Center, provides best practices for collecting Healthcare Is a Human Right video testimonials that speak to both personal struggles with the current health care system as well as visions for a universal health care system.

This online Letter to the Editor form, featured on the Vermont Workers’ Center’s website, offers useful tips for writing letters to the editor and the ability to submit letters directly to Vermont media outlets.

This worksheet, produced by the Vermont Workers’ Center, provides an easy to use template for writing a Healthcare Is a Human Right letter to the editor. The Vermont Workers’ Center’s website also features an online Letter to the Editor form that offers useful tips for writing letters to the editor and the ability to submit […]

This article describes the Vermont Workers’ Center’s approach to media and communications. Amongst the many themes it addresses are how the VWC thinks about making media, the role movement media plays in shifting public discourse and creating a shared vision based on human rights principles, and how media makers are also organizers.

These human rights standards for financing healthcare were developed by Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign as part of a detailed rights-based proposal for financing the state’s universal healthcare system. Download the standards below or read the full proposal here.

In this report, the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign sets out financing standards for universal healthcare and specifies a mix of equitable revenue sources for financing Vermont’s universal healthcare system.

This table illustrates the five stages of Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign from a policy perspective. It outlines which policy tools have been developed for which advocacy phase of the campaign with reference to the human rights framework.

This set of 10 criteria was developed by Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign to facilitate the determination of “lines-in-the-sand” for specific issues, which may arise over the course of advocacy activities, such as new opportunities or threats to the campaign’s policy positions. A “line-in-the sand” means that a campaign commits to taking action […]

This policy training tool was designed to help Vermont Workers’ Center members to better link their own healthcare stories to the HCHR Campaign’s collectively agreed policy positions, thus enabling members to communicate and advocate for policy positions in a more compelling and effective way.

This fact sheet puts forward human rights principles for a broader economic and social rights agenda in the U.S., as agreed by grassroots groups that came together in a Human Rights at Home campaign in 2012.

This article explains why the Affordable Care Act fails to ensure the human right to health care and discusses how the HCHR campaigns are building a people’s movement to win publicly financed healthcare systems in their states to realize human rights.

This handbook orients new members of the Vermont Workers’ Center to the organization’s mission, analysis and strategic orientation, history, structure, human rights organizing approach, campaigns, fundraising, budget, by laws and organizational agreements. It also provides new members with lessons from the organization’s Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign, a list of organizational partners and movement […]

At the 2013 Left Forum in New York City, leaders from the Healthcare Is a Human Right campaigns in Vermont, Maine and Maryland presented their organizing model for achieving universal, publicly financed health care in their states. Moderated by NESRI, panelists discussed their collaboration, lessons learned, and how to expand this movement to other states.

At the US Social Forum (Detroit in June 2010), Rishi Manchanda from the South Los Angeles Coalition for Health and Human Rights, Kim Abbott from the Montana Human Rights Network, Peg Franzen from the Vermont Workers’ Center, and Anja Rudiger from NESRI discuss approaches, challenges, victories, and lessons learned in their struggles for human right […]

This article in Common Dreams reprints the open letter from economists to Vermont legislature calling for universal, publicly financed healthcare. The article concludes that “Thursday’s letter indicates that the grassroots movement has not lost momentum.”

This open letter, signed by 70 organizations, urges Gov. Shumlin not to give up on universal, equitably financed healhtcare and calls on the Vermont legislature redouble their efforts to develop and agree on a public financing plan that advances equity and realizes Vermonters’ right to healthcare.

This letter, signed and submitted by over 100 economists, states that universal, publicly financed healthcare is not only economically feasible but highly preferable to a fragmented market-based insurance system.

This is the final report of The World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. It contains a plethora of recommendations for all countries, including a call for universal, equitable health care.

This article explains why the current healthcare system is exacerbating inequality in our society and how public healthcare financing can help change this. It uses the equitable healthcare financing plan introduced by Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign to illustrate why healthcare is a matter of equality.

In this 2014 Left Forum presentation, NESRI’s Anja Rudiger sums up the strategic lessons from Vernont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right movement and explains the domino strategy of health care wins across the country.

This presentation sets out the basics for using a human rights approach to develop broad-based campaigns and advocacy initiatives for health care reform, illustrated with examples of lessons learned from Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign.

This statement was created by a grassroots coalition to describe a collective vision for a society guided by human rights. It describes how human rights arise from people’s struggles for justice, how governments are accountable for upholding human rights, how principles must guide struggles, and how a human rights vision builds unity among people and […]

This report summarizes the discussions and conclusions at two community-based human rights convenings, at which a broad range of grassroots organizations developed a critical analysis of the human rights crisis in the United States, defined common goals, and identified common strategies.

This report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council by NESRI and a coalition of seven collaborating organizations. It addresses serious and ongoing issues in the state of economic and social rights in the US, and gives recommendations for action by the US Government.

In the journal Health and Human Rights, Elizabeth Tobin Tyler explores health and human rights strategies in the US. While she mainly focuses on legal approaches, she also stresses the importance of grassroots organizing to drive policy change by highlighting the Vermont Workers’ Center’s campaign for universal publicly funded health care.

In the journal Health and Human Rights, Elizabeth Tobin Tyler explores health and human rights strategies in the US. While she mainly focuses on legal approaches, she also stresses the importance of grassroots organizing to drive policy change by highlighting the Vermont Workers’ Center’s campaign for universal publicly funded health care.

This analysis of the new federal health reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010, was prepared for a national tele-briefing organized by the Opportunity Agenda on March 31, 2010.

This presentation, prepared for the conference “Health and Human Rights in Connecticut” at the University of Connecticut, April 28, 2011, shows how the human rights framework can be used for health reform advocacy in the United States, with examples from Montana and Vermont.

Despite all the celebrations about the federal health reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010, the law fails to meet the key human rights standards of universality, equity, and accountability.

Over recent years, health reform advocates in a number of U.S. states have run campaigns for including the human right to health care in state constitutions. This review summarizes these efforts, analyzes challenges common to this advocacy strategy, and offers key lessons learned. It examines cases from Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida.

This report provides an in-depth human rights assessment of single payer health care proposals, along with a framework for assessing legislation. It compares single payer plans to the market-based insurance model and finds that a single payer approach is able to meet most human rights standards.

In this third volume of the Swiss Human Rights Book series, leading international experts in human rights and health address issues such as access to essential medicine, HIV/AIDS, trade and health, SARS and malaria, and human rights approaches to other key health challenges. They address the role of governments, non-state actors and healthcare practitioners, the […]

This fact sheet compares single payer health care proposals to market-based approaches, based on human rights principles, and finds that single payer proposals are far better at meeting human rights standards. Download the factsheet below, or read the full report on single payer and human rights here.

In its series of fact sheets on the human rights impact of the new law, the NESRI release this analysis from the perspective of people of color. We find that the law’s failure to meet the key human rights standards of universality, equity, and accountability has concrete repercussions for people of color.

This article examines how the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) creates an opportunity to reevaluate healthcare reform — and explains how Vermont’s human rights model for healthcare reform meets people’s fundamental needs in a way that the ACA’s market-based model cannot.

The human right to healthcare offers an analytical and advocacy framework for shifting the healthcare reform debate from individualist, market-based approaches to the collective responsibility for health care as a public good.

In this article, Senator Bernie Sanders affirms healthcare as a right and states that “at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women’s rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is […]

This article presents a first-person, “hands-on” account of efforts to operationalize a human rights framework in public health advocacy and action in a local setting, King County, a jurisdiction of Washington, USA, that includes the city of Seattle.

This chapter by Paul Hunt, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, and Gunilla Backman from the book Swiss Human Rights Book Volume 3: Realizing The Right To Health, identifies right-to-health standards for health systems.

This article discusses the health policy proposals of the 2008 presidential election campaign and primaries, thereby offering a historical perspective on the reform positions that have shaped health policy under the Obama administration

This article lays out the human rights principles stated and agreed upon by collaborating organizations of the People’s Movement Assembly on the Right to Health at the US Social Forum in Detroit to guide the struggle for health and healthcare in the United States.

This case study of Vermont’ Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign presents the history of the campaign and its 2011 success, analyses the rationale, strategy and tactics of the campaign, and offers lessons learned for developing transformative grassroots campaigns.

This book article outlines the history of the human right to health in the U.S., derives principles and standards from international human rights law, and offers a human rights framework for guiding health reform efforts.

This article shares lessons learned for effective organizing and focuses on the importance of uniting across issues to create a powerful movement capable of confronting the fundamental problem of economic injustice.

The People’s Recipe was developed by the Vermont Workers’ Center through their Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign and the Put People First campaign, and by learning from other people’s organizations and movements. The People’s Recipe highlights the key ingredients of the Vermont Workers’ Center’s organizing model. This resource provides a brief definition and key […]

These human rights standards for health care “benefits” were developed by Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign to hold the government accountable for enabling access to all needed care and meeting all health needs.

This tool enables a human rights assessment of a healthcare benefits proposals, based on key human rights principles. It was developed for assessing the Green Mountain Care universal healthcare system planned in Vermont.

This document explains the significance of the 2012 Supreme Court case dealing with challenges to the federal healthcare reform act and responds to frequently asked questions regarding the relationship between the ”Affordable Care Act” and the human right to healthcare.

This article is part of a report by the Echo Justice Communications Collaborative on developing innovative and effective communications strategies for community organizing. The article describes how the Vermont Healthcare is a Human Right Campaign used the human rights principle of universality to preempt division over immigration status and ensure that the healthcare law included […]

This document introduces the Healthcare is a Human Right Campaign’s proposal for equitable healthcare financing, which would replace premiums, deductibles and co-pays with public financing through progressive taxation.

This assessment chart defines the detailed human right to health care standards developed by Vermont’s Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign in 2010 to evaluate the reform proposals put forward by Dr. Hsiao (under Act 128 Vermont law).